Practical Interventions for Young People at Risk

Kathryn Geldard, Kathryn Geldard, Author

• Publisher: SAGE Publications Ltd
• Year: 2009
• Print ISBN: 9781847875624, 9781847875617
• eBook ISBN: 9781473903197
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Sciences sociales
• Subtopic: Travail social

"The book?s rich, relevant and comprehensive contributions from experienced writers make it a substantial resource for teaching, reference and research."

Mark Prever, trainer, writer and supervisor

"The needs and problems of young people are currently extremely topical and justify a dedicated textbook. The wide range of internationally renowned authors contributes to the strengths and diversity of this publication, enhancing its potential as a resource for students and professionals."

Jenny Pinfield, University of Worcester

This book responds to the urgent need for practical intervention approaches targeting young people at risk. It provides a much needed practical resource for practitioners and students from a variety of helping professions.

Focussing on interventions that practitioners can use in collaboration with the young person, the book offers hands-on strategies for addressing challenges and issues typically face by young people, such as:

- Depression, suicide and self-harm

- Substance Misuse

- Problematic Sexual Behaviour

- Marginalised Youth

- Mental Health Issues.

Throughout the book, multi-disciplinary and international authors share their expertise, highlighting relevant evidence-based interventions and considering themes such as anti-oppressive practice, culture, values and ethics.

It will prove invaluable reading for students and practitioners working with young people, especially in the fields of youth work, social work, psychology, counselling, and education.

Part I

Introduction

Engaging Young People Collaboratively

Kathryn Geldard

Because you are reading this book, I thought you might be interested to know what motivated me to invite a group of international authors to join with me in putting it together.

For many years, I have worked as a counsellor in both mental health systems and private practice. In these environments I have tended to specialize in working with young people and their families.

My work with young people has convinced me that they are not an homogeneous group. Each young person is an individual with their own attitudes, beliefs, constructs, behaviours and unique responses to the challenges presented to them. I have discovered that the strategies and interventions I use with a particular young person during counselling have to be not only relevant to that young person’s situation and issues but also appealing to them so that they will be engaged in the therapeutic process. It is clear to me that what suits one young person may not suit another. Consequently, I developed a way of working collaboratively and proactively with each young person, valuing them as individuals and inviting them to be actively involved in the selection of counselling strategies and interventions that are of interest and use to them.

In my work, I began to recognize that there are a number of commonly identifiable challenges faced by young people. For example, one young person might be troubled by sexual issues, another might find it difficult to control a tendency to light fires, while another might be struggling with issues related to membership of a cult group. These challenges, combined with a notion affecting Western society that misbehaviour, even crime, among young people could grow to such an extent as to threaten the social fabric of society (Gregory, 2006), have led many people in our communities to become fearful, to some extent, of young people who do not have conventional lifestyles – those who do not live in a traditional family structure, are not employed or are not enrolled in a course of study, for example. In particular, homeless young people are regarded with discomfort and the lifestyles of delinquent young people tend to generate both fear and concern among members of the general public.

Fortunately, there is now increasing recognition that a young person can be both an ‘offender’ and a ‘victim’ and success in enabling them to learn and develop socially adaptive behaviours is most likely to be achieved through empowerment and helping them to take responsibility for the choices they make themselves when facing the challenges associated with the transition to adulthood.

When, as a counsellor, I met with a young person experiencing an issue related to challenges such as these, I would sometimes recognize that I did not have a well-informed background with regard to the nature of the challenges confronting them and might not be aware of the best possible strategies and interventions available. Naturally, in such instances, I would seek out the information that was required. However, I often wished that I had, at my fingertips, a single resource, from which I could access information with regard to the most common challenges confronted by young people, along with the strategies and interventions that have been found to be most useful for addressing these. Consequently, I decided to invite authors with special expertise to join with me in writing this book.

Rather than only looking for specialists in particular fields from my own country – Australia – I thought that it would be more useful to seek out international experts. In this way, solutions and interventions for change would be represented by a diverse group of authors with expertise in their selected fields of interest. By accessing such diversity, I believed that I would be honouring the diversity and uniqueness that exist among the young people in our communities and with whom we work. Consequently, I set about inviting internationally recognized authorities on particular challenges for young people to contribute to the book. I was delighted by the responses I received and the enthusiasm shown by the people I approached, who agreed to participate as authors and share their expertise in their areas of interest. The consequence is that contributors to this book include experts such as Alan Carr from Ireland, Scott Henggeler, Lee Richmond, Robert Cole, Susan Blaakman and Daniel Le Grange from the United States of America, Simon Hallsworth, Richard Ives, Peter Smith and Daryl Sharp from England, Ian Lambie from New Zealand and Ian Shochet, Wendy Patton and Susan Moore from Australia, together with many others with similar international profiles.

As a consequence of the international contributions to this book, my hope and expectation is that it will prove an extremely valuable resource for both practitioners and students with regard to strategies and interventions to help young people at risk.

I think it is important that, before considering specific strategies and interventions, we should have a clear understanding of what is meant by ‘young people’ and ‘at risk’.

What do we mean when we refer to ‘Young People’?

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When I first planned to write this book, I was thinking in terms of the stage in life where young people experience a transition from childhood to adult life. Many publications on helping young people refer to this group as ‘adolescents’ – a term that might suggest all young people fit into an homogeneous group with similar patterns of thinking and behaving. This does not fit at all with my own experience of young people, whom I have found to be uniquely individual with regard to their attitudes, beliefs, constructs, reactions and general behaviour. Consequently I, and the other authors in this book, prefer to use the words ‘young people’ as they are both accurate and respectful when referring to those who may be helped by using the interventions described in this book. At times, however, reference will be made to the term ‘adolescent’ as it appears in the research and literature.

What do we mean by ‘At Risk’?

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Can you remember what it was like when you grew up? When I think about my own development, I realize that moving from being a child to being a young person and then an adult involves much more than a linear progression of change. It is multidimensional, involving a gradual transformation or metamorphosis of the person as a child into a new person as an adult. During this process, psychological, physiological, biological and social changes have to be confronted. I remember that, during this stage of life, I began to re-evaluate my identity and was confronted with moral and spiritual challenges, which is typically the case for most young people.

Every day, it is common to read of the demands and stresses increasingly faced by young people. For example, finding employment in competitive conditions, developing relationships with others, demands for self-organization and adaptation to technology all provide challenges and they are likely to be experienced as stressful. Additionally, many young people experience anxiety and stress related to personal safety and security in an age of national and international events that are often alarming and disturbing. It is important for us to recognize, however, that there are individual differences, some young people coping with these challenges more easily than others. Those who are not able to negotiate the challenges they confront successfully experience failure, which may result in emotional and psychological harm.

I will argue that, because of the many difficult challenges that young people are confronted with, often for the first time in their lives, all young people should be thought of as ‘high risk individuals’.

It is important to remember that there are many young people who have specific needs or confront specific issues that make their lives particularly difficult to manage. Clearly, challenges that persist despite a young person’s attempts to overcome them are likely to compromise their long-term well-being unless specific and informed help is provided.

The positive aspects of risk

When considering the interventions described in this book, I would like to suggest that it can be helpful to remember all young people are vulnerable to risk and risk-taking behaviours, as this is an inevitable part of their developmental stage. Rather than considering the idea that ‘risk-taking’ is primarily an indiscriminate response to earlier unresolved adversity or power struggles with parents and/or society, however, it might be helpful to redefine these struggles as contributing to a potentially positive growth process whereby challenge and risk are the primary tools young people use to find out who they are and determine who they will become. Understanding the way that young people make meaning of their lives through their own personal experiences is important when engaging with them collaboratively in interventions for solutions. Recognizing how those experiences are influenced by the family, wider society, culture, the environment, socio-economic and political factors, lifestyle and, most importantly, developmental issues is central to the collaborative process of selecting those interventions that will fit for each young person.

The Need for Collaborative Engagement

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As discussed previously, in order to be respectful of young people as individuals who are capable of making their own decisions, it is important to work collaboratively with them in any process. Throughout this book, there is an emphasis on using a collaborative process.

In the counselling literature, it is well established that the relationship between the practitioner and client, more than any other factor, contributes to successful outcomes (Lambert, 1992). Consequently, if we are to work effectively with young people, we need to build relationships with them that are based on respect, trust and a non-judgemental stance. Creating such relationships enables us to engage in collaborative conversations and have a participatory and reciprocal dialogue with them. By doing this, we can bring alive practices and ideas from postmodern therapeutic approaches, such as narrative therapy and solution-focused counselling. Any control issues arising in the relationship can then be intentionally invited into the conversation so that the politics of ‘roles’ is worked out as practitioner and young person take up or resist calls to occupy positions of ‘privilege’ or ‘the subject’.

Acceptance of diversity

Unfortunately, it is common for people in our contemporary society to regard differences from conventional standards as socially undesirable. I believe, however, that we will be more successful in our interventions with young people if we are able to accept such differences in the ways young people adjust to the challenges they confront. We need to recognize that what is considered a success by some may not be an optimal or attainable solution for others. It is important to identify adaptation patterns that are congruent with the experiences of young people in different circumstances and recognize and respect different solutions (Schoon, 2007). Throughout this book, therefore, there is a recognition of the need for an acceptance of diversity in solutions to the challenges facing young people and the importance of providing a diversity of opportunities in the community to build, maintain and sustain resilient and adaptive behaviour. Also, it is important to emphasize that it is essential to consult with young people themselves and work collaboratively with them. Failure to do so will inevitably affect the impact and usefulness of the strategies and interventions under consideration.

Recognition and building on strengths

An emphasis throughout this book is to focus on the young person’s strengths rather than those things that are problematic or pathological. Clearly, important processes of change need to occur within a young person if they are to identify their strengths and adaptively confront the challenges that face them with success so that they can experience positive outcomes. One way to invite young people to begin this process is to understand the stories and narratives of young people. The stories that young people tell describe themselves and their lives. Sometimes these stories are unhelpful and, instead of enabling them to live satisfying lives, the stories that they live out cause problems for them. Collaborative conversations can be used to help practitioners understand and value the struggles encountered by young people and help them to replace problem stories with other more useful stories. Often young people can begin to understand themselves and their relationship with the world if practitioners operate under the social constructionist assumption that problems are anchored and supported by dominant cultural discourses or taken-for-granted cultural prescriptions for how we should act and make sense of our world. Thus, engaging young people in collaborative interventions is about deconstructing their dominant stories and bringing forth and thickening alternative, preferred accounts of how the young person would like to be.

By listening to the life stories of young people, as practitioners, we can begin to understand the ways in which they are confronting and experiencing challenge and risk along the path to self-discovery. We can then support and speak out for them, encouraging the community to accept collective responsibility for the importance, empowerment, rights, well-being and humanity of young people.

Making Use of a Diverse Range of Interventions

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Throughout this book, a variety of practical intervention processes are discussed, including:

• health promotion as a primary intervention
• using young people to help...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• About the Contributors
• Part I Introduction
• Part II Building on Strengths
• Part III Suicide and Self-harm
• Part IV Confrontational Behaviour
• Part V Substance Abuse
• Part VI Sexual Behaviour
• Part VII Mental Health
• Part VIII Marginalised Young People
• Part IX Summary
• Index